Office365 connectivity issues after 5pm and on weekends

Office365 connectivity issues after 5pm and on weekends

My wife and I have been using Hughesnet to work from home since August. We both have similar computers and are using Microsoft Outlook. We had not had any problems (except limits to monthly bandwidth) until about 3 weeks ago. All of a sudden, one day, both of us were unable to send and receive emails after 5pm on weekdays. Typically, the issue was resolved when we started working again the next morning at 9am.

When the issue is occurring, Outlook will lock up or say "Trying to Connect" and emails (even small ones) will sit in the outbox until the next day (sometimes, they randomly get out if we leave Outlook open all evening.

I have confirmed with HughesNet that they don't believe it is an issue with general connectivity. I can still ping outlook.office365.com and get normal 600ms response. And, I can use other apps including going into my company's VPN and using a separate Outlook on a virtual machine.

I found one other HughesNet user who had the same issue and it doesn't look like they have been able to get resolution either. If we cannot find an answer to this, I will have to move on to another company. It is bad enough that I cannot use more than 20GB a month (my nieces and nephews eat up the entire allottment if I don't steal their iPads from them when they come over for an afternoon) but this is completely untenable. I have to work at night.

I would appreciate some help to figure out what configuration or setting is causing this issue.

Re: Office365 connectivity issues after 5pm and on weekends

Good morning Brett,

Thank you for the details, this helps. Can you please try removing and re-adding the e-mail account in question (just on one of the computers for troubleshooting purposes). Let me know if that makes a difference. Also, if one of your devices is a laptop, can you confirm if this issue persists on a non-HughesNet connection?

Your cooperation, patience, and understanding are much appreciated.

Thanks,Liz

Did my post answer your question? Accept as Solution to help others find it faster.--------------------------------->

Re: Office365 connectivity issues after 5pm and on weekends

Liz, I will ask my tech support team to remove and re-add the email accont as I am not sure what that means. They have already tried removing MS Office and reinstalling and that didn't change the result. This is literally an issue that occurs like clockwork in the evening and is fine again at 9am the next day. It also occurs over the weekend. If I drive 5 miles, I can use my phone's wifi hotspot to connect my laptop and then send the emails (as a I mentioned, some of these emails being tiny ones with no attachments). I am looking into moving to a different provider as this is no longer tenable. When I need to send something to colleagues at night, I move to other tools like Slack and gmail which work fine.

Re: Office365 connectivity issues after 5pm and on weekends

Good morning Brett,

Thank you for the additional information. That is very interesting. So starting three weeks ago, only your Office365 started having connectivity issues between 5pm-9am and on weekends. However your other services like Slack and Gmail work fine. Sounds like Office365 isn't playing well with the HughesNet service. While you're at it, I'd check with your IT folks if they are aware of any updates or changes to Office365 (if that's something they deployed for all employees) that was done about three weeks ago. They might have information that might shed light on what's happening.

Thanks,Liz

Did my post answer your question? Accept as Solution to help others find it faster.--------------------------------->